nmcli for WiFi on Raspberry Pi OS 12 'Bookworm'

If you haven't already, check out my full video on the Raspberry Pi 5, which inspired this post.

Raspberry Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' is coming alongside the release of the Raspberry Pi 5, and with it comes a fairly drastic change from using wpa_supplicant for WiFi interface management to everything network-related running through nmcli, or NetworkManager.

nmcli is widely adopted in Linux these days, and it makes managing WiFi, LAN, and other network connections much simpler.

I thought I'd jot down my notes using nmcli for some Pi testing, mostly for my own reference. There are tons of guides with hundreds of examples to choose from, but these are some of the commands I find myself running frequently:

# Quick status of all interfaces
nmcli dev status

# Detailed overview of all interfaces
nmcli

# Get a list of all WiFi SSIDs
nmcli d wifi list

# Disconnect from a WiFi network
nmcli con  # Get the NAME of the WiFi connection
nmcli con down "connection_name_here"

# Connect to a WiFi network on a specific WiFi interface
sudo nmcli d wifi connect "ssid_here" password "password_here" ifname wlan1

nmcli commands often require root privileges, so add sudo before the command if you get a warning like "[XYZ] failed: Not authorized to [do XYZ]."

For debugging WiFi issues, iw is always handy as well:

# Show detailed information about a specific WiFi interface
iw dev wlan0 info

# Show WiFi link details (signal strength, bitrates)
iw dev wlan0 link

And of course, if you're using the GUI on the Raspberry Pi, they have a handy little WiFi connection menu you can use.

Alternatively, there's a more user-friendly console front end for NetworkManager, nmtui (which should also be present on Pi OS):

For the quickest way to monitor link quality (instead of using watch with one of the above commands), install wavemon and run wavemon wlan1 (or whatever interface you want to monitor). Press 'l' to view a graph over time of link signal quality, and play with your antenna location.